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A Family's Resolve: Get Rid of Shah at Any Price

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TEHERAN, Iran, Jan. 11 — The four room mud‐gray brick house of All Rais Ghasem lies in a teeming district of southern Teheran, one of the many pockets of resistance to the Shah that stretch south of the luxurious residential areas.

The Walls surrounding the modest house are pockmarked with bullet holes, and on the corner across the street patches of dried blood on a wall are identified as that of three “martyrs” shot to death by troops during a demonstration 13 days ago.

Zahra Ghasem, Mr. Ghasem's wife, saw them die. “I cried,” she said, “because I am only a woman and I thought how my own sons may die just like them.”

For Mr. Ghasem, his wife and their two sons and for the other families in the neighborhood, shootings, riots and anarchy have become normal as they go through the day's routine with a resigned stoicism born of the belief, shared with a majority of the 33 million Iranian Moslems, that their daily discomforts, privations and sacrifices are all for a noble purpose — the fall of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi.

Mr. Ghasem, a thin, dark‐haired man with a face marked by worry lines, has been unable to work as an auto mechanic for two months because of the political upheaval. His 23yearold son Mehdi has not been able to attend his college, which closed in September, and 14‐year‐old Moshen's high school has been shut for weeks. Fuel for the family car, the stove and the hotwater heater has been in short supply for two months.

Nonetheless, the family keeps to its ways: praying five times a day, visiting the wounded and the bereaved, scrounging out a subsistance diet and periodically joining in demonstrations.

The Ghasems rise at 6:30 A.M. for morning prayers, then go back to sleep until 8:30 because no one has anyplace else to go. Breakfast is bread, tea and goat cheese, lunch is boiled rice mixed with brown beans and dinner Is eggs and pan‐fried potatoes. Meat is on the menu about once a week, when Mrs. Ghasem is able to find it.

Snow is falling and the house is bitterly cold because neither a large kerosene stove nor a small portable heating stove shaped like a lantern is lit. Since the supply of heating fuel dried up several weeks ago as a result of the strike in the southern oilfields, the family lights the portable stove only when the cold becomes unbearable.

“You have to stand in line for about six hours to get your ration of heating oil,” said Mehdi, who was an engineering student at the Iran College of Science and Technology. “To get your 20 liters [about 5 gallons] of gasoline for the car you have to keep the car in line for up to three days.”

As a result of the fuel rationing, the family's red 1966 Rambler stands in the small courtyard under a plastic cover.

Frequent exposure to death seems to have made everyone in the family accept it as an everyday occurence. “Seeing my friend killed has not stopped rue from going to demonstrations, although I am more careful,” Mehdi explained. “Even Moshen goes.””

Mrs. Ghasem, who sits on a worn vinyl and aluminum couch in a sparsely furnished room, is draped in a billowing, flower‐printed chador, the traditional garment, which she holds closed with her teeth to hide her face; when she speaks she turns away from a visitor so it cannot be seen.

“I do not try to stop my sons from joining the demonstrations,” she said. “If they die for their religion, what importance is the pain I will suffer? All my life I have prayed to see the Shah out of Iran. I will not question any price God makes me pay for that.”

Moshen, a slight boy who looks years younger than his age, sits near his mother. He said he would prefer that his high school, which has been shut for most of the last three months, never opened again if it was going to be the same as before.

The family of Ali Ghasem is typical of millions of devout working‐class Iranians who form the backbone of the opposition. They feel that the Shah and his kin have built a corrupt and decadent society in which everyone has to be bribed, religious precepts are ignared and the rich get away with anything and everything.

In normal times Mr. Ghasem made, 40,000 rials ($570) a month, but now he manages to find work only occasionally and the family is living on its savings. “We can go on like this for months, even a year, if necessary,” said Mrs. Ghasem, who has become an expert buyer, making daily tours of the food shops, which are the only ones still open.

While she was shopping Mr. Ghasem visited a woman with six children whose husband was killed in a demonstration and who lives in the two remaining rooms of a burned‐out house. After giving her money collected in the neighborhood, he visited a nearby hospital where scores of wounded demonstrators were recovering from bullet wounds and gave them money he helped collect from local merchants.

The two boys spent their day between the house and a nearby boulevard where crowds of youths were milling about shouting political slogans but never quite organizing into a real demonstration.

Shah's Stand Not Satisfactory

The Shah's expressed willingness to leave the country, at least for a while, and his appointment of a civilian Government do not appease anyone in the Ghasem family. “All the concessions the Shah is making prove how weak and unpopular he is,” Mr. Ghasem commented, “and show the wisdom of Ayatollah Khomeini when he says that we can get him out on our own terms and have a true Islamic republic.”

After evening prayers the family prepared to go to bed by candlelight. Only the older son has a room to himself; the rest sleep huddled together on bedding laid over a bright carpet.

Mehdi has taped two portraits on the wall of his room. One is of All Shariati, the late Islamic scholar who helped initiate a religious revival among young Iranians, the other of a ballerina doing a pirouette. When the visitor noted that the ballerina was not wearing a chador, Mehdi, smiling and shrugging, said, “But she is so beautiful.”

A version of this archives appears in print on January 12, 1979, on Page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Family's Resolve: Get Rid of Shah at Any Price. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe